Progress in Rural Geography (Routledge Revivals)

Michael Pacione

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781134598526
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Geografía

This wide-ranging volume, first published in 1983, reflects the increasing scope of the field of rural geography in the second half of the twentieth century. Although traditional areas of study such as agriculture and the land-use patterns of the countryside remained important, scholars also began to consider rural transport, employment, housing and policy, as well as to develop new theories and methodologies for application to study. The chapters included here addressed the need for a review of the changes that had taken place within the field of rural geography, and as such provide an essential background to students with an interest in rural demography, planning and agriculture.

1 THE EVOLUTION OF THE SETTLEMENT PATTERN

M. Bunce

The recent revival of interest in the rural areas of the industrialised world is, understandably, dominated by the question of contemporary change. Yet the preoccupation with recent rural transformation frequently ignores the settlement framework within which it occurs. Rural settlement exhibits strong continuity with the past, creating landscapes which often outlive the recurrent social and economic changes that occur within them. This is not to say that the framework is static, rather that it has historical depth evolving, to use Hoskins’s (1955) term, as a palimpsest: layers of evolution in which features of various times in the past contribute to the patterns of today.

The pattern of rural settlement in England is strongly influenced by significant periods and events. For example, the Anglo-Saxon settlement was responsible for clearing large areas of woodland and establishing the framework for village settlement and open-field cultivation. The Norman Conquest heralded the feudalism of the Middle Ages and entrenched village society as well as the concept of large rural estates which has continued to be so much a part of the English rural landscape. The Black Death led to widespread village abandonment. The enclosure movement added dispersed elements and created the diversified settlement pattern which exists to this day. More recent events, such as the rapid rise of industry and urbanism and the growth of land use planning, have all had a major impact on the pattern of rural settlement.

Taxonomic Approaches

The history of rural settlement, however, has unfolded in a variety of regional and local circumstances. The diversity of European and North American rural landscapes is the result of the unique combination of historical variables in each region and even in each place. It is the recognition of this that led to the tradition of local and regional description in rural settlement studies. Yet the need to establish some interpretive order out of this empirical complexity was quickly recognised. This began with the descriptive work of the German and French schools of settlement geography. The profusion of regional descriptions which dominated nineteenth-century settlement study soon produced a call for taxonomic order. Classification, it was presumed, would establish a framework which would permit general interpretations of rural settlement patterns. Strongly influenced by the German School and the later work of French scholars numerous typological schemes have been proposed. These have employed a variable mix of morphological, locational, functional and genetic criteria in a largely futile attempt to produce taxonomic models which could have general application.

However, any attempt to make sense of the complexity of rural settlement patterns must begin with the summary of its main components, and in this sense, classifications have been helpful. Most typologies are based upon the division of rural settlement into nucleated and dispersed forms, with further subdivision into the three basic elements of village, hamlet and dispersed farmstead. Certainly, over the broad sweep of history, these have been the basis of rural settlement structure. However, this framework is not readily applied to a spatial dimension. Various attempts have been made to divide Europe into uniform regions of villages, hamlets and dispersed settlement. Thorpe (1964) for example, has proposed broad zones of rural settlement along these lines. Yet this, and other regional classifications, have little empirical foundation. Firstly, the spatial distinction between nucleation and dispersal is rarely clear-cut. Secondly, few regions can be said to be composed of a single settlement type. The process of settlement evolution has produced a mix of elements. Nucleated and dispersed forms, villages and farmsteads co-exist in most rural areas of Europe and North America, and, furthermore, are functionally interdependent.

Despite the mainly descriptive format of most classifications, the intent of the taxonomic tradition has been, for the most part, to produce models of settlement patterns and to suggest the main factors influencing their evolution. Meitzen (1895), for example, based his typology upon the four criteria of morphology, field systems, ethnic origin and relationship to the physical environment. Demangeon (1927) classified villages according to field systems and morphology, and proposed four categories of dispersed settlements based upon the chronology of dispersal. The most recent attempt at classification, that of an IGU Commission, has so far generated 66 criteria for explaining rural settlements in terms of topological and chronological position, degree of permanency, economic and social structure, size and morphology (Uhlig, 1972).

Nucleation and Dispersal

One model in particular has dominated this work: the nucleation-dispersal dichotomy. The influence of Meitzen in this respect is legendary, for it was he who initiated the idea that rural settlement patterns should be interpreted in terms of the relative distribution of nucleated and dispersed farms. He suggested a direct relationship between the type of agricultural system and ethnic structure, which in turn determined the existence of nucleation and dispersal. His deterministic association of village settlement with Germanic culture, and of independent farmsteads with Celtic origins was easily discredited as regional exceptions were produced to disprove the rule.

However, the emphasis upon nucleation and dispersal has remained. Meitzen set off a debate which stimulated an interest in the refinement of general interpretations of the two types of settlement pattern. The rejection of his ethnic hypothesis led directly to interpretations which stressed the deterministic influence of particular factors such as field systems, physical environment, defence and social structure. However, attempts to use this as a basis of a general theory of European settlement (such as Gradmann’s (1929) steppenheide thesis, and Aurousseau’s (1920) association of village settlement with scarce water supply) were simplistically deterministic and had little empirical foundation.

To some extent, the exigencies of defence help to explain nucleating tendencies. The village form itself owes much to the need for group security during the initial stages of land settlement, and to the subsequent need to protect village territory. In regions of long-term insecurity, too, other factors have often been secondary to defensive requirements. Large, highly-concentrated villages in the Mediterranean region owe their origin to recurrent periods of instability. In Corsica, for example, the rural settlement pattern is dominated by strongly nucleated villages which are a response to what Thompson (1978) has described as ‘a history of almost incessant conflict’. Again, however, we must be cautious of a deterministic interpretation. Agnew (1944–6) has pointed out that despite the great unrest of Languedoc between the end of the Roman period and the seventeenth century, the concentrated village was slow to evolve.

The role of physical factors in the development of a nucleated-dispersed dichotomy is somewhat more obscure than that of defence. Thorpe (1964) among others, has attempted to draw a clear distinction between upland and lowland Britain, arguing that upland environments encouraged pastoralism and therefore dispersed patterns, while the lowlands provided the extensive and fertile land base necessary for village settlement. Yet, many parts of upland Europe have long been dominated by villages, largely because the terrain leads to isolated pockets of close-knit communities which tend to favour village settlement. On the other hand, it can also be shown that the scarce and fragmented distribution of agricultural land in mountainous areas mitigates against large-scale village settlement and permits only scattered farmsteads.

The problem with considering the role of external factors such as defence and environment is that they do not operate in isolation, but in the context of social and economic circumstances. In an agricultural society this suggests that rural settlement patterns have a general relationship with agrarian systems, and in particular with the organisational framework of rural society. Meitzen himself proposed a fundamental relationship between field systems and settlement types, a hypothesis which has since received a good deal of empirical support. In terms of nucleation and dispersal, there is general agreement that village settlement has evolved in association with collective systems of open-field agriculture, while dispersal is linked to independent cultivation of enclosed fields.

Thus we can trace the evolution of the village in Europe to the establishment of first communal and then feudal systems of land tenure and use. Whether social organisation, economic necessity or environmental constraints caused this relationship between settlement and land use would have varied from one region and one period to another. For example, Saxon and Scandinavian settlers brought with them to Britain social organisations which favoured nucleated settlement. Yet the process of extensive land clearance and the ploughing of heavy soils reinforced the need for communality and cooperation and entrenched the village as a settlement form. With the rise of feudalism in Europe during the Middle Ages this structure was ensured to the advantage of land-owning groups, and the rural population became firmly fixed in village territories. The open-field system which accompanied most feudal arrangements demanded strict observance of cultivation laws and restricted the dispersal of peasant dwellings. Indeed, it has been suggested that in a system with scattered strips and compulsory crop rotation, the optimum settlement pattern would be a nucleated one (Smith, 1967).

There was considerable variation in the nature of feudal villages, particularly in the relative freedom of sections of the peasantry which seems to have been a function of the degree of manorial authority. Nevertheless, as Smith has suggested, the bulk of today’s villages in Western Europe were founded by the mid-fourteenth century, under a political system which inevitably led to the nucleation of population into highly-organised agricultural communities.

By contrast, the dispersal of settlement has generally been associated with individual cultivation and tenure. There is considerable evidence to support this both in the original settlement of certain regions and in the dispersal of settlement from village cores. The dispersed patterns of parts of Ireland, Wales and Brittany, for example, owe much to the limited amount of community organisation of early Celtic society in which freemen lived outside small clan hamlets on independently cultivated land in a loosely-organised infield-outfield system (Johnson, 1961). Dispersed settlement was characteristic also of the expansion of settlement on to poorer land in parts of Europe during the Middle Ages. In areas such as the English Fens, the Pays de Caux and northern Sweden, scattered farmsteads originated in late-medieval piecemeal clearing and reclamation, the gradual extension of pastureland beyond village boundaries and the creation of enclosures by individual peasants.

The analysis of early dispersal of rural settlement in Europe favours both culture and economics as the motivation. Thus Celtic social organisation permitted the independent location of farms while the pastoral economy was more efficiently pursued within an infield-outfield system. And the colonisation of new land was the result of land shortages particularly at a time when manorial authority was beginning to loosen its control of the peasantry.

More extensive dispersal in Europe, however, is linked to the gradual weakening of feudalism and to the spread of enclosures in which the economic and social advantages of the individual farmstead set in its own fields were recognised. Herein lies the impossibility of distinguishing between regions of nucleation and dispersal, for over much of Europe the characteristic pattern is a mixed one: the result of various periods of secondary dispersal from village cores. The close association between independent cultivation and dispersed settlement reaches its height in the New World where early settlers eschewed the village and established the pattern of independent, dispersed farmsteads which so dominates the contemporary rural landscape.

In Pennsylvania, for example, William Penn’s original plans for settlement were for an orderly scheme in which townships would be dominated by agricultural villages. Yet the general pattern that developed after 1700 represents a direct rejection of Penn’s philosophy, by settlers who held a quite different view of the New World. Their ideology was an independent, liberal one which represented a desire to break away from the already declining authority of the European village. Some groups, such as the Quakers, had religious reasons for avoiding Penn’s villages, but most settlers saw both economic and social advantages in living at the centre of their newly-acquired land (Lemon, 1972). In Quebec too, the feudal seigneurial land division system in the early seventeenth century was not transferred intact from France. As Harris (1966) has shown, the independence of the habitants (settlers), the general poverty of the seigneurs (manorial lords), and the pioneer environment of the St Lawrence lowlands limited the social and economic influence of the seigneurs. Villages did not develop to any great extent, despite the wishes of the authorities, for the habitants immediately saw the benefits of independent settlement particularly when illegal participation in the fur trade offered useful remuneration.

These trends reflected the growing movement in Europe towards dispersal and greater independence of land use and tenure. Yet, like the enclosure movement itself, it represented a fundamental change in the relationship between settlement and land, in which the objectives of agriculture shifted from subsistence to commercialism. In some areas and periods in Europe, such as during the secondary dispersal of farmsteads in southern France and the Tudor enclosures in Britain, this involved local and private initiative. However, later enclosures in Britain, settlement schemes in Holland and, more extensively, the spread of settlement across North America, represented official policy on the appropriate pattern of rural settlement. In North America, the westward expansion of settlement was preceded by a survey which laid out individual lots within a grid pattern, a system which ensures a dispersed pattern of farmstead settlement.

Location and Distribution

Clearly the functional relationship between social structure, agrarian systems and settlement forms has strongly influenced the evolution of rural settlement. Yet a serious weakness of this as an explanatory model is that it has been framed largely in terms of nucleation and dispersal. The problem with this dichotomy is that it ignores the great complexity of settlement patterns. Even if we accept the notion of two great divergent forces in the history of rural settlement, actual patterns do not break down so simply. One important reason for this is that patterns are more a function of the location and relative spacing of elements than of their simple categorisation.

This has been recognised by recurrent attempts to explain rural settlements in terms of the factors which have influenced the specific location of elements. Contemporary patterns to some extent reflect site and locational decisions taken at various times in the past. Again the roles of defence, of the physical environment and of social and economic factors have been emphasised. However, much of the work along these lines has been highly descriptive, interpreting each factor in a single cause and effect relationship. Clearly the selection of settlement sites would have involved a combination of variables the relative importance of which varied from place to place.

Chisholm (1968) has approached this problem by proposing a systematic model in which the siting of settlements is determined by the availability and relative importance of agricultural land, water supply, fuel and building materials. The site chosen for settlement would be that which achieves the minimum total cost of using these resources, rather than one which is attracted to a single resource. Yet Chisholm also recognises that settlement patterns are not simply determined by initial site-selection but by subsequent processes which affect the spacing of individual settlements. Noting the apparent regularity of the spacing of villages in eastern England, Chisholm suggests that the extent of village territory, in part, would have been determined by the maximum distance that villagers were prepared to travel to their parcels of land. Beyond that, new villages would have been formed whose sp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. The Evolution of the Settlement Pattern M. Bunce
• 2. Land Use and Competition A.G. Champion
• 3. Structural Change in Agriculture I.R. Bowler
• 4. Population and Employment A.W. Gilg
• 5. Housing A.W. Rogers
• 6. Transport and Accessibility D.J. Banister
• 7. Rural Communities G.J. Lewis
• 8. Recreation M.F. Tanner
• 9. Resource Evaluation and Management P.J. Cloke
• 10. Rural Planning D.L.J. Robins
• Notes on Contributors
• Index